Paralo, a golf technology startup, has raised £270,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round from angel investors. Of the founder-led angel round, £250,000 was raised under SEIS, at a £3 million pre-money valuation.
Founded in 2026 by Jarrad Hicks and Zaheer Merali, Paralo is developing software to replace the fragmented systems currently used to run golf clubs, spanning membership, tee sheets, competitions, payments, EPOS, food and beverage, marketing, reporting and agronomy. Sitting above that operating layer is a connected golfer product designed to work across clubs, competitions, societies and golf trips. The architecture allows individual clubs to retain their own operating rules, identity and member experience rather than standardising around a single way of working, with the stated intention of making a golf club "more itself". Rather than selling a fixed software package, the founders spent months working inside golf clubs, shadowing staff and mapping operations before developing the platform.
Golf clubs can currently rely on more than 20 separate software products to manage their operations, while golfers often need several different applications to play a single round. Golf's technology market has historically offered clubs limited choice, with legacy systems deeply embedded and data fragmented across vendors. In some markets, access to core infrastructure is controlled by governing bodies: in England, technology providers require approval from England Golf to connect to World Handicap System infrastructure, and Paralo is still waiting for that access. Greater interoperability, club choice and open technical standards are what Paralo believes the next generation of golf technology will be built around.
Hicks previously worked in healthtech, selling technology into complex hospital environments, while Merali is a senior systems engineer whose previous experience includes Cisco and Webex. The platform is currently being deployed with one of the UK's leading private golf clubs, which is working with Paralo as an early design partner.
Funding will be used to expand product and engineering development, continue deployment with design-partner clubs and build the infrastructure connecting club operations with the golfer-facing product. Paralo is initially focused on golf clubs in the UK and Ireland.
Golf is an incredibly sophisticated sport sitting on surprisingly fragmented technology. I couldn't understand why I needed three apps to play one round, and once we started spending time inside clubs it became clear that the problem went much deeper. We don't think golf needs another app. We're building the infrastructure underneath the club and the product above it. We're still waiting for access in England despite support from some of the country's leading clubs. We want to earn our place on the quality of the technology we build. Ultimately, clubs should be able to choose the products that best serve their members.
The complexity should sit underneath the product, not with the golfer or the club team. That's the engineering problem we're interested in solving.
